1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of controlling a packet transmission interval, and more particularly, to a method of controlling a packet transmission interval, the method being employed to minimize delay errors by controlling an interval between packets to be transmitted and maintain a constant transmission performance.
2. Description of the Related Art
A constant delay time should be maintained between packets in order to transmit packets at a constant transmission speed through a network.
For example, when the maximum amount of data that can be included in one packet is 1500 bytes and when data is to be transmitted at a speed of 1 gigabits per second (Gbps), 83,333 packets should be transmitted per second (1 Gbit=125,000,000 bytes, 125,000,000/1500≈83,333). Therefore, an interval between packets should be 12 μs.
To maintain the interval of 12 μs, a SLEEP function provided by an operating system (OS) kernel is used. According to the SLEEP function, however, as the interval between packets is reduced to less than 1 ms, errors increase, thereby reducing the transmission speed without intention.
In addition, whenever one packet is transmitted, the interval between packets is measured, and the measured interval is compared with a preset delay time. Then, if the two values are different, the interval between packets should be adjusted, thus causing overhead on a central processing unit (CPU).
Accordingly, this has led to the need for a method of controlling a packet transmission interval, the method capable of minimizing CPU computation overhead and allowing packets to be transmitted at regular intervals at a target transmission speed.